Single topic only

I’m trying to find a way to us bbPress that allows me to have only a single topic and nothing more for the whole site.

I have a site, http://bulldogs.rleague.com/ which is basically a guestbook on steroids with user moderation, profiles and various security features. The main feature, and the thing that has kept it alive for over 12 years, is the very simple, flowing format which evolved from a guestbook.

I want to replace the bespoke PHP because I’m tired of maintaining it all, and adding new features is a pain in the neck.

I’ve been playing with bbPress today and it has the simplistic approach that suits my needs. However, I need to find a way to basically make the default landing page a topic, and to hide/remove all functionality that is related to multiple topics and multiple forums.

I’m happy to mess with the core code and maintain it for upgrades, but a plugin approach would be preferable. However, I don’t know where to even start. Is it something I can achieve with a different template, or do core functions need modification or plugin-based override?

The other piece to this puzzle, and I think I saw an answer already, is that the display order of posts needs to change to be the most recent at the top.

Why not have a WordPress blog with a single page and comments allowed? With threaded comments in 2.7, it would be even better, IMO, for discussion. No one would be able to create new topics in WordPress.

I am considering that approach as well. Part of the problem I face using WordPress is finding the plugins to allow the user moderation, comment moderation and user profile features I’m after. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places for WordPress plugins, I dunno. I’ve been spending most of my time looking at Joomla for another major site replacement so haven’t got much time to explore WordPress.

I mentioned over on _ck_’s forum that I’m willing to pay someone to help me nut this out … whether it’s WordPress comments-based or bbPress matters little to me, I’m just looking for a solution

I’m not even considering Joomla for this. Joomla is for the news part of our site and not a consideration for this at all.

I’m basically tossing up between bbPress and WordPress.

I like the bbPress plugin bbPress Moderation Suite because it will allow my moderators to ban users for a period, generate an email and automatically remove the ban once it expires. However, I’m yet to find a way to reverse the order of posts in a topic so it’s most recent to least recent.

However, I find it easier to limit WordPress to only showing a “single topic” because, essentially, I can just post a single item and have the Comments do the rest. With some minor tweaks I can have the default WordPress page as the single post and remove other navigation features. I have the plugin for reversing the sort order so that’s covered too. But the user moderation features don’t appear to match that of “bbPress Moderation Suite” and I’m keen to have that for my moderators.

Basically, I’m looking for forum-like features with the following constraints:

a single topic and viewing it is the default page

descending sort order

no user private messaging

If I can then add poll and live chat plugins, as well as some basic filtering options by allowing posters to tag their posts, that would be a bonus.

I know how to manipulate the templates sufficiently to cripple the navigation and make it look like there is only one page, but I don’t know how to change front-page.php (as referred to in index.php) to essentially be topic.php?id=2 so that is the default index view.

If it were me, (which it’s not ) I would use WordPress for this. Everything seems easier except for the comment moderation, but searching for comment moderation plugins for WordPress turned up a few options. So, I think I would narrow my search to WordPress plugins rather than trying to strip out 85% of the functionality that exists in bbPress.

I was able to achieve most of what I wanted to do with almost no core hacks.

I editted my template front-page.php to basically be topic.php but without the re_permalink() ; call and statically setting $topic_id = 2.

The core hack I made was to change functions.bb_templates.php to modify all location query functions to trick it into thinking ‘front-page’ is topic-page instead (these are mostly case statements inside functions like is_front() and is_topic()) , meaning that post.php, post-form.php and /bb-post.php all fuinctioned on my new front page in the same way they would on topic.php. I would prefer to develop a plugin that did this modification, but I don’t have time to make one.

So it essentially does what I wanted it to do, albeit with a core hack that will have to be manually maintained in future releases unless a plugin is developed.

In the last few days, I’ve basically discovered that neither WordPress or bbPress can do more than 60% of what I want, and it’s a different 60% in each case. bbPress has one major advantage for me over WordPress right now, and that is bbPress Moderation Suite. WordPress has nothing remotely resembling it and I doubt I’ll be able to find someone willing to build it, even for cash. But even bbPress Moderation Suite is missing one key thing for me, and that’s email notification to the users, but Nightgunner is working on that one already.